What is really nice about the full Zen line is they are supporting ECC memory. It always felt like Intel had removed this on lower end chips just to force users to buy a Xeon even if the did not need the rest of the Xeon features.

Yeah, the Xeon-E3 lines lack of PCI-e lanes is really underwhelming. I've got a LSI 9200-8e and Mellanox Connect-X 2 in my ProLiant ML10 used as my FreeNAS box, leaving a total of 4 PCIe lanes available - thankfully I don't see any need for more AIB's in this machine, but if I used it as a workstation that needed a GPU + another board or two it'd be a really awful situation to be in.

Considering how hard Intel is pushing Thunderbolt it makes little sense how hard they're gimping their consumer and workstation CPU's when it comes to PCIe support.